Fashionably Late. Olivia Goldsmith

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      Well, what else was new? She habitually ran late. Fashionably late. Jeffrey always told her she tried to do too much. But after all these years, Belle still got in a frenzy whenever Karen was tardy. That’s what Belle called it and through pursed lips expostulated: ‘There is no need for tardiness.’ Sometimes Belle sounded exactly like a second-grade teacher, which was exactly what she had been when she first met her husband. But once they adopted Karen, Belle had never taught again, at least not professionally. She had taught Karen how to dress; how to make hospital corners on sheets (‘Fitted sheets are for lazy women’); how to properly polish good leather shoes; how to wax her legs; how to set a table; how to write a thank-you note; how to correctly sew on a button; and a million other small but unforgettable life lessons. In some ways, Belle was born to teach.

      Maybe that was her problem as a mother, Karen thought. Belle only had the two of us to work on. It got too concentrated, too intense. She should have spread it around among a class of thirty children every year. It certainly would have taken some of the pressure off Karen and her younger sister, Lisa. But if Belle had worked, would Lisa have been conceived at all?

      Karen stopped herself. There I go, blaming my job for my infertility. Karen reminded herself again that the doctor had said the problem was not entirely age-based; that it was probably congenital. How had he put it? That ‘it was aggravated by age.’ Well, she was aggravated, all right. Karen couldn’t put the idea out of her mind that if only she and Jeffrey had tried earlier, if they had put just a little of their effort into reproduction instead of into the business, they might have succeeded. She was famous – infamous really – for never taking no for an answer. ‘If you don’t take no, you’ve got to get a yes,’ she often told her staff. But she’d have to take a no on this.

      Of course, they could try to go the petri dish route. But Karen knew that Jeffrey would be opposed, and she was herself. After all, with all the unwanted babies, all the hungry and homeless in the world, how could she justify spending thousands just to try to perpetuate her genes? Somehow, it didn’t work for her. Not that there were any guarantees, anyway.

      If only I’d tried earlier, Karen thought. If only I’d …

      That’s crazy, she told herself. That’s the backlash of guilt women feel if they can’t do everything perfectly. Look at Connie Chung. Is she busy hating herself this afternoon? You’ll drive yourself meshuggah with this, so stop it.

      The taxi jerked to a halt behind a bus that was belching black smoke and also had one of those annoying John Weitz ads staring at her. The cab was still three long blocks from Penn Station and they were the three cross-town blocks of Thirty-Third Street that would be hell on a rainy Friday. Fuck it, Karen murmured to herself, and leaned forward, putting her face close to the hole in the bulletproof plexiglass partition that separated her from the driver. ‘How much to drive to Long Island?’ she asked.

      ‘JFK?’ he questioned with a voice that rose in a hopeful Pakistani-like lilt.

      ‘No. Rockville Center. On Long Island. Only a little further than JFK,’ she lied. But she was desperate. Still, she wondered if she had enough cash. One of the perks of success: Karen hadn’t been in a bank in years. Her secretary got her cash, but Karen perennially ran short of it. She’d made a habit of tucking folded hundred-dollar bills into the zipper compartments of all her purses. Emergency money. She opened this one and, sure enough, there was the hundred. She took it out, unfolded the crisp creases, and showed it to the driver, slipping part of it into the little scoop for the fare. He eyed it hungrily and turned off the meter.

      ‘How we go?’ he asked. The accent didn’t really sound Pakistani. And that odd bolero jacket he was wearing was interesting. If it was done in a faille … Anyway, he wasn’t Pakistani. Maybe Afghan. They drove camels, not Buicks, didn’t they?

      ‘Through the Midtown tunnel, then the LIE. Not too far,’ she lied again. Well, it would probably take less time to get to Rockville Centre than it would to get across Manhattan. And she just might, with luck (and if they beat the traffic even by only a few minutes), make it to Belle’s house in time for dinner.

      To her relief, the driver agreed. Karen directed him to turn east instead of west and leaned back on the thinly cushioned plastic seat, clutching her hands over her perpetually empty womb. It will be okay, she told herself. Jeffrey will understand. He won’t be too disappointed and we can start to talk about adoption. We may be a little old for the Spence-Chapin agency’s standards but Sid could probably arrange a private adoption, or know lawyers who do. Money would be no object and they would have their baby. It will be all right, Karen told herself. She wouldn’t take no for an answer.

      The approach to the Midtown tunnel was utter chaos – Karen imagined it looked like the final evacuation of Saigon. The cabbie lurched behind a huge eighteen-wheeler and jockeyed into position. The fumes were unbearable. Karen watched as all that metal tried to insert itself into the narrow tunnel opening. It was a lot like the medical procedures she’d been through lately, she thought with pain. Not that they’d done any good. She sighed. As the taxi began to inch its way into the mouth of the tunnel, the radio with its ghastly music cut off. Karen, grateful, closed her eyes against the glare of the tunnel lights and waited while the double-lane procession of vehicles made their escape from New York.

      At last the cab surged out of the Midtown tunnel toward the LIE. The misty rain was turning to a deluge, and in less than twenty minutes Karen knew that the VanWyck Expressway would be flooded, as would the BQE. The infrastructure of the city was falling to shit. ‘Hurry,’ she told the driver, trying to beat both the rain and the rush hour. ‘Hurry,’ she said aloud again, and tried to believe that once she got to her mother’s it would all be all right.

CHAPTER THREE

       Cut from a Different Cloth

      Karen Kahn, nee Lipsky, had been adopted by Belle and Arnold Lipsky when she was already three-and-a-half years old. That was late for an adoption. She had very few memories of her early childhood and none of that time before she lived at 42–33 Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn with Belle and Arnold. She wasn’t sure if that was normal or not, but she figured that the trauma of leaving one home for another would be enough to produce early amnesia in any child. She knew, vaguely, that she’d been fostered out, but her real memories began with Belle: Belle pushing her down Ocean Avenue toward Prospect Park in a stroller. At almost four years old, Karen must have been too big for one, but perhaps Belle had wanted to pretend that Karen was still a baby. Perhaps Karen herself had wanted to pretend it.

      What she could remember clearly was the stroller, its blue and white stripes and the silly bobble fringe on the sunroof. With it, she remembered the bells of the Bungalow Bar ice cream man, and the fascinating little house – complete with shingled roof – on the back of his truck. She remembered her mother handing her that first creamsicle, and the pleasure she got not just from the taste but from the contrast of the bright orange ice and soft, white creamy center.

      From around that time she could also remember an early morning visit to the Botanical Gardens: the lilacs had just come into flower and she had darted among several enormous bushes, delighted by the smell of the flowers and the exquisite colors that the purple fountain of blossoms made against the satiny green leaves. She had laughed and run from bush to bush – until she glanced around and noticed that Belle was nowhere to be seen. Karen remembered how, once she was alone, the bushes took on an ominous look, hunching over her menacingly, and she had begun to cry. When Belle found her, she had scolded Karen both for running ahead and for crying.

      Belle Lipsky was not, perhaps, the ideal maternal figure. Small-boned and thin, she was always СКАЧАТЬ